Steve Hockensmith - Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - Dawn of the Dreadfuls

“What of the temperatures where you come from, Mr. Hawksworth?” Mrs. Bennet said, lifting the shoe heel from her daughter’s toes. “Do they range as unseasonably high?”

“Yes,” the Master said.

He reached out with the two smooth sticks he used in lieu of a proper fork or spoon, grabbed hold of a mound of rice, and stuffed it into his mouth. Mrs. Bennet waited patiently while he finished chewing so he could finish his thought, but he simply speared a floppy pink wad of fish and stuffed it in after the rice.

Mrs. Bennet grimaced and looked away, and when she again found her voice (which, alas, was never lost for long) she abandoned warmth as both a topic of conversation and a model for her deportment.

“Well. I’m glad to see you’re enjoying your food . . . if you can call it that. You’ll find the streams of Hertfordshire overflowing with fat, juicy trout you may pluck out and tuck into at your leisure. If I may ask, where is it that you acquired a taste for such awfully fresh fare?”

“Japan.”

Hawksworth shoveled in more rice.

“Japan?” Mrs. Bennet said. “That’s the little island nation down around New South Wales, is it not? Full of Orientals?”

Hawksworth finally looked up from his plate—so he could scowl at Mrs. Bennet.

“Yes, yes,” Mr. Bennet mumbled, wincing. “That is the place.”

Elizabeth and Jane shared a wide-eyed glance. Master Hawksworth—a young man scarcely older than they—had actually traveled to Japan! If only he weren’t so stern and taciturn. There were so many questions to ask!

For Mrs. Bennet, however, there was only one.

“Such a long journey would surely cost a fortune. Your family could afford such a venture?”

“No,” Master Hawksworth said.

Mrs. Bennet frowned.

“But I have a patron for whom money is no object,” the Master added.

Mrs. Bennet smiled.

Master Hawksworth was looking at Mr. Bennet.

“I shan’t name names, yet I will say this: My benefactor has held true to the code others found it so easy to abandon once The Troubles were over. I was sent to Japan to learn and live by that code. Soon, your daughters will be living by it, as well. And perhaps dying by it . . . if they can earn such an honor.”

Mr. Bennet listened intently, solemnly, and when Hawksworth was finished, he replied with a single nod.

Mrs. Bennet, on the other hand, had stopped paying any attention whatsoever after the words “money is no object.”

“Tell me, Mr. Hawksworth,” she chirped, “do you like to dance?”

The Master froze with a glistening glob of raw flesh halfway to his face. “Pardon me?”

“In a little more than a week, there is to be a ball,” Mrs. Bennet said. “Some of our best local girls will be having their coming out—including our own Elizabeth. I’m sure you, as our guest, would be welcome.”

Master Hawksworth stared at Mrs. Bennet the same way she’d have stared at him had he stuck his eating sticks in his ears and mooed like a cow. After a moment, however, he overcame his dismay and reverted to his standard expression—which was, actually, an almost total lack of expression at all.

“I have no time for such frivolity, and neither do my students.”

“Your students?” Mrs. Bennet scoffed. And then, her voice edging toward panic as his meaning dawned on her: “Elizabeth? And Jane? But of course they must be at the ball.”

“When there is so much for them to learn and so little time to learn it?” Hawksworth shook his head. “I cannot allow it.”

“Who are you to allow or not allow anything here?”

“I am the Master.”

“Not of me, you’re not! And if I say Jane and Elizabeth are going to the ball, they’re . . . oh, you tell him, Mr. Bennet!”

“We will discuss this after dinner,” Mr. Bennet said softly. He seemed to be anticipating the conversation with all the enthusiasm of a condemned man looking ahead to his own hanging.

“Mr. Bennet!” his wife gasped. “You aren’t actually siding with this . . . this . . . whatever he is?”

“ After dinner , woman.”

Which was answer enough for Mrs. Bennet.

“Ohhhhhhhhhh!” she cried, rolling her head and grabbing Mary with one hand, Kitty with the other. “My last hope, gone! Instead of throwing my eldest in the path of eligible bachelors, they’re to be thrown to the unmentionables! And so go the rest of us, girls—to a potter’s field or down a dreadful’s gullet, one or the other! And all because your father started taking orders from some ponytailed stripling who doesn’t even have the sense to cook his fish!”

Lydia and Kitty joined in with weeping of their own, and even Mary’s eyes took to watering behind her spectacles (though Elizabeth suspected this had more to do with the way her mother was crushing her hand).

When Elizabeth glanced at Hawksworth to gauge his reaction to this spectacle, she was surprised to find him intently gauging hers . He seemed both puzzled and approving at the same time, as if he were asking himself a question Elizabeth herself had considered often over the years: How did she come to be in the same family as her younger sisters and mother?

As Elizabeth watched, a placid blankness fell over the Master’s face, like a curtain being brought down on a play, and he looked away and rose from his seat.

“From now on,” he said calmly, picking up his plate, “I shall take all my meals in the dojo.”

Mr. Bennet watched him walk out with a look that was equal parts humiliation and jealousy. He then turned to his wife and undertook the fruitless task of calming her without outright giving in to her.

“I will speak to him in private, Mrs. Bennet. Our young friend doesn’t understand the full importance of the ball, that’s all.”

“Explain it to him, then! Tell him the estate is entailed away, and helping two of our daughters land husbands is the least he can do if he’s going to lead the other three to their doom!”

“Yes, well, there is more to the ball than the Master could guess, and I think he might change his mind once all the facts are laid out before him.”

“What do you—?” Elizabeth began.

Her mother talked right over her question, though—and kept on talking until the opportunity to ask it was gone.

“The Master ! Oh, how it rankles to hear you speak of the pup thus. So rude, he is! So aloof! To think that our very survival should require you to grovel before a guest in our own home—and such an ungracious one, at that!”

And so on.

As it turned out, a guest in their home Hawksworth was not, for he not only finished his dinner in the dojo, from then on he did his sleeping there, as well. Mrs. Bennet regarded his retreat from the dining table and guest room as a victory over the man, and the next morning she had another: Her husband informed her that the Master had relented. Jane and Elizabeth could attend the ball after all. Unfortunately, Mrs. Bennet had but a few hours to savor her triumph.

Mr. Bennet and the girls were practicing new stances with their Master—and, consequently, working on the speed of their laps and the crispness of their dand-baithaks —when the scream rang out from the house. It was a shriek of pure horror, high and piercing, and it didn’t fade away but instead simply cut off, as if suddenly stifled.

Within seconds, Elizabeth and her father and sisters were charging inside, and they found Mrs. Bennet splayed out on the foyer floor. Her eyes were closed, and a kneeling Mrs. Hill was frantically fanning her with a piece of paper.

“My word!” the housekeeper cried. “I think she went and fainted for real, this time!”

“What happened?” Elizabeth asked.